Tar is short for Tape Archive and is unique in that you can pick between different compressions such as gzip, bzip2 or xz.
Archive
Example 1 - gzip Compression
-c Create
-p Preserve Permissions (extract all protection information)
-v "Verbose mode" lists every file as processed.
-z Filter the archive through gzip
-f Use archive file
tar -cpvzf BackUpDirectory.tar.gz /path/to/directory
Example 2 - bzip2 Compression
Excludes files with a specific extension or characteristic.
-c Create
-p Preserve Permissions (extract all protection information)
-v "Verbose mode" lists every file as processed.
-j Use bzip2 compression.
-f Use archive file
--exclude=*.psd Exclude any Photoshop files.
--exclude=".*" Exclude any hidden files.
tar -cpvjf my_tar_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory --exclude=*.psd --exclude=".*"
Unarchive
-x Extract files.
-z Filter the archive through gzip
-v "Verbose mode" lists every file as processed.
-f Specify the archive's filename.
-C Extract the files to a specific directory.
tar -xzvf my_tar_archive.tar.gz -C /path/to/directory